He’d been sitting in a garden, under a large tree, and he noticed the position of his arms and legs, somewhat uncomfortable but very balanced, and a flower came to mind, a lotus.

Not often, but also, not infrequently, he’d considered the possibility that he was in fact divine, and not just divine, but “the” divinity, the divinity often referred to as “god”, and that he’d incarnated and in incarnating, had voluntarily surrendered the powers popularly associated with divinity, and that consequently, he could not escape his mortality, nor could he put to right all the horrors, injustice and inequity he’d experienced or observed as a mortal.  Then, usually, he’d reject the possibility, realizing what he’d think of anyone else who made that sort of claim or posited that sort of possibility.  Then, on third thought, he wondered if divinity had in fact incarnated and been rejected, possibly confined to a sanatorium or worse.

What about Jesus he wondered?  Into which category did he belong?  The divine or the deluded or perhaps, merely the confused?

The something related came to mind, as though it had been planted there, perhaps planted an eternity ago in everyone that there had ever been.  What if the divine had in fact incarnated but in each and every one of us, in the good and the evil, the sane and the insane, in believers, non-believers and agnostics, in victims and victimizers?

And he realized just how likely that was.  A somewhat foolish and immature divinity, perhaps the only divinity.  Trapped in an evolutionary mass prison of his, her or its own making, unable to escape, unable to repent, unable to correct an infinity of errors.  Forced to trust that somehow or other things would, at the very least, improve instead of to worsen (as seemed the norm).

No more prescience, or omnipotence, or ubiquity.  Just regret for a very foolish but apparently irrevocable error.

He’d been sitting in a garden, under a large tree, and he noticed the position of his arms and legs, somewhat uncomfortable but very balanced, and a flower came to mind, a lotus.

And he dreamed of a state of being where all his errors might disappear, where everything might disappear, all emotions, all desires, all fears, all memories, perhaps even all mistakes.

Abnegation he thought, or would that merely be self-serving denial, a quest to avoid the consequences of primordial mistakes.

What if rather than dead, god was only so thoroughly dispersed among us that like Humpty Dumpty, neither all the King’s horses nor all the King’s men could ever put him (or her or it) back together again.

That might well explain a great many things, perhaps even everything.

But then again, perhaps not.
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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2023; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen).  Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales.  He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review, available at Substack.com, a commentator on Radio Guasca FM, and an occasional contributor to the regional magazine, el Observador.  He has academic degrees in political science (the Citadel), law (St. John’s University), international legal studies (New York University) and translation and linguistic studies (the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies).  However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta and cosmogony.  He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.